Detail - Produced in close collaboration with the artist, this volume documents new projects commissioned for The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, alongside Cai Guo-Qiang's own survey of his artistic journey and the personal cosmology that informs his work. It features a rich sampling of Cai's wonderfully diverse oeuvre, including explosion events, gunpowder drawings, and installations. Informative essays and a conversation with the artist explore Cai's influences, from traditional Chinese scrolls and his father's miniature paintings to Asian philosophy and memories of his grandmother. Including never-before-published new works and unprecedented contributions by the artist himself, this book promises to be an important reference on Cai's art for years to come.

Detail - Throughout his career, Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang (born 1957) has used the motif of the boat to represent the exchange of knowledge across cultures. In his latest monograph, "A Clan of Boats," Guo-Qiang gathers his use of the motif into a single compilation and speaks for the first time about the many works he has created with boats throughout the course of his artistic career. "I am actually a vessel myself," he writes in this volume; "I left home a long time ago, the centuries-old harbor city of Quanzhou. I sailed to Shanghai first, and then to Tokyo, New York, and the rest of the world, further and further, shuttling between different ports, different natural sceneries, cultures, and histories." The book includes an essay written by art critic Karen Smith and two interviews (conducted ten years apart) by Hans Ulrich Obrist.

Detail - Featuring 14 artists and one pair of artistic collaborators, What about the Art? Contemporary Art from China examines the contributions of Chinese artists to the international canon of contemporary art. Including works by Hu Xiangqian, Hu Zhijun, Xu Bing, Jenova Chen, Li Liao, Jennifer Wen Ma, Zhou Chunya, Yang Fudong, Liang Shaoji, Xu Zhen, Liu Xiaodong, Liu Wei, Wang Jianwei, Huang Yong Ping and Sun Yuan & Peng Yu, this volume explores each artist's unique formal language and methodology. Curated by New York-based, Chinese-born artist Cai Guo-Qiang to counter an over-simplified Western understanding of Chinese contemporary art as either solely market-driven or politically rebellious, What about the Art? aims to tell a different story. As Cai puts it: "What I always thought was missing from exhibitions about Chinese contemporary art was the artist's individual creativity, and I wanted to single that out."

Detail - This exhibition, which arises from Cai Guo-Qiang?s ongoing dialogue with El Greco and in which he establishes a relationship with the great masters represented in the Prado, comprises nearly 30 paintings made with gunpowder; eight of them ignited on-site at the Salón de Reinos. Also on view are an oil and an acrylic created at the start of his activities as a painter; and various sketches and drawings.0Widely illustrated with works from all periods and techniques of the artist, this book dedicates much of its pages to illustrate the daily work of Cai Guo-Qiang at the Museo del Prado, as a "live" photographic record of his creative process. This is the first book in Spanish that shows how the Chinese artist works.0The catalogue includes four essays by Miguel Zugaza, former Director of Museo del Prado, Alejandro Vergara, curator of the exhibition and Chief of Flemish Painting of Museo del Prado, Kosme Barañano, Doctor in Art History, and the artist Cai Guo-Qiang.00Exhibition: Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, Spain (25.10.2017-04.03.2018).

Detail - The 25th Anniversary ebook, now with more than 50 images. 'Touching the Void' is the tale of two mountaineer’s harrowing ordeal in the Peruvian Andes. In the summer of 1985, two young, headstrong mountaineers set off to conquer an unclimbed route. They had triumphantly reached the summit, when a horrific accident mid-descent forced one friend to leave another for dead. Ambition, morality, fear and camaraderie are explored in this electronic edition of the mountaineering classic, with never before seen colour photographs taken during the trip itself.

Detail - "Over the course of two years, a twenty-something punk rocker eats a cheese slice from every pizzeria in New York City, gets sober, falls in love, and starts a blog that captures headlines around the world--he is the Slice Harvester, and this is his story. Since its arrival on US shores in 1905, pizza has risen from an obscure ethnic food to an iconic symbol of American culture. It has visited us in our dorm rooms and apartments, sometimes before we'd even unpacked or painted. It has nourished us during our jobs, consoled us during break-ups, and celebrated our triumphs right alongside us. In August 2009, Colin Hagendorf set out to review every regular slice of pizza in Manhattan, and his blog, Slice Harvester, was born. Two years and nearly 400 slices later, he'd been featured in The Wall Street Journal, the Daily News (New York), and on radio shows all over the country. Suddenly, this self-proclaimed punk who was barely making a living doing burrito delivery and selling handmade zines had a following. But at the same time Colin was stepping up his game for the masses (grabbing slices with Phoebe Cates and her teenage daughter, reviewing kosher pizza so you don't have to), his personal life was falling apart. A problem drinker and chronic bad boyfriend, he started out using the blog as a way to escape--the hangovers, the midnight arguments, the hangovers again--until finally realizing that by taking steps to reach a goal day by day, he'd actually put himself in a place to finally take control of his life for good"--

Detail - The term "process art" describes a moment of radical, a formal experimentation in postwar American sculpture. Through the medium of drawing, Afterimage revisits process art in terms of the artists who defined the movement and suggests a transitional moment when many of its practitioners anticipated the feminist and postminimalist art of the 1970s. Nancy Grossman's use of language, for example, suggests a kind of material abstraction, and Nancy Holt's earth works and related drawings introduced content into a minimalist vocabulary. The book also explores the drawing as a residual object in works in which the process of making dictates the form of the drawing. Examples include Gordon Matta-Clark's stacked cuttings, Robert Morris' "blind time" drawings, and Sol Lewitt's folded construction drawings. Other works, such as those by Bruce Nauman and Robert Smithson, record a particular approach to body-based and process-oriented sculpture. The book, which accompanies an exhibition, contains an essay by Cornelia H. Butler on the historical ambiguity surrounding process art and one by Pamela M. Lee on temporality in work of the late1960s. The artists included in the book are William Anastasi, Richard Artschwager, Mel Bochner, Agnes Denes, Nancy Grossman, Robert Grosvenor, Marcia Hafif, Eva Hesse, Nancy Holt, Barry LeVa, SolLewitt, Lee Lozano, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Gordon Matta-Clark, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, Yvonne Rainer, Dorothea Rockburne, Alan Saret, Joel Shapiro, Robert Smithson, Michelle Stuart, Richard Tuttle, and Jack Whitten. Copublished with The Museum of Contemporary Art. Los Angeles.

Detail - From the moment that he first shook up the world in the mid 1950s, Elvis Presley has been one of the most vivid and enduring myths of American culture. Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley is the first biography to go past that myth and present an Elvis beyond the legend. Based on hundreds of interviews and nearly a decade of research, it traces the evolution not just of the man but of the music and of the culture he left utterly transformed, creating a completely fresh portrait of Elvis and his world. This volume tracks the first twenty-four years of Elvis' life, covering his childhood, the stunning first recordings at Sun Records ("That's All Right," "Mystery Train"), and the early RCA hits ("Heartbreak Hotel," "Hound Dog," "Don't Be Cruel"). These were the years of his improbable self-invention and unprecedented triumphs, when it seemed that everything that Elvis tried succeeded wildly. There was scarcely a cloud in sight through this period until, in 1958, he was drafted into the army and his mother died shortly thereafter. The book closes on that somber and poignant note. Last Train to Memphis takes us deep inside Elvis' life, exploring his lifelong passion for music of every sort (from blues and gospel to Bing Crosby and Mario Lanza), his compelling affection for his family, and his intimate relationships with girlfriends, mentors, band members, professional associates, and friends. It shows us the loneliness, the trustfulness, the voracious appetite for experience, and above all the unshakable, almost mystical faith that Elvis had in himself and his music. Drawing frequently on Elvis' own words and on the recollections of those closest to him, the book offers an emotional, complex portrait of young Elvis Presley with a depth and dimension that for the first time allow his extraordinary accomplishments to ring true. Peter Guralnick has given us a previously unseen world, a rich panoply of people and events that illuminate an achievement, a place, and a time as never revealed before. Written with grace, humor, and affection, Last Train to Memphis has been hailed as the definitive biography of Elvis Presley. It is the first to set aside the myths and focus on Elvis' humanity in a way that has yet to be duplicated.

Detail - In the Spring of 2006, Cai Guo-Qiang, the Chinese-born, New York-based artist known for his ambitious explosion works and large, theatrical sculptures and installations--his most notorious work, commissioned by The Museum of Modern Art soon after 9/11, was a barrage of exploding fireworks that hovered over the city, showing that 'something used for destruction and terror can also be constructive, beautiful, and healing'--was invited by The Metropolitan Museum of Art to create a site-specific exhibition in the museum's roof garden. Those four works are featured in-depth here, including a tall glass sculpture surrounded by replicas of dead birds; a stone relief depicting post-9/11 vignettes; a pair of life-sized cast-resin crocodiles pierced with thousands of sharp objects confiscated at airport-security checkpoints; and "Clear Sky Black Cloud," an ephemeral work consisting of an actual black cloud that would hover over the roof garden and then burst into the sky at regular intervals, bleeding afterwards into nothingness.